The Encyclopaedia Metallum is the definitive central reference source for most metal-related matters. It has, in addition to its encyclopedic factual content, tens of thousands of percentage-scored, user-attributed, peer-moderated reviews of metal recordings. What it does not have is any sort of similarity analysis to make use of the huge data-graph represented by the connections between bands, users and ratings. There is a wearyingly mundane reason for this, too: trying to do similarity analysis with SQL queries will make you want to eat your own neck.

So here is a small contribution to the world's knowledge on this admittedly peripheral subject, the missing similarity analysis of EM user/review/band data:

Pick a band, see the other bands that people who like the first band also like.

Data wants to form shapes. In a better world, this would be just as easy for EM to do themselves, updating live, as it is for them to serve their raw data into web pages. If I do my day-job well enough, eventually everyone will have better tools. I'm not designing them to tabulate heavy metal, I'm designing them to answer questions. Not all answers turn out to be shaped like Truths, of course. But if you can't answer them, you can't be sure which are which.